The Difference Between Knowing And Seeing • Why Intelligence Services In Africa Are Still Fighting The Last War

The article "The Difference Between Knowing And Seeing • Why Intelligence Services In Africa Are Still Fighting The Last War" highlights the fundamental issue that many intelligence services in Sub-Saharan Africa are still operating in a backward-looking capacity. For decades, these services have been trained to record and report on past events, creating extensive incident diaries that provide a detailed account of what has happened.

However, this approach is fundamentally flawed when it comes to national security intelligence, which should instead focus on predicting future threats and events with a degree of confidence. The article points out that the intelligence architecture in many African countries was never designed to provide an integrated analytical picture of complex problems, but rather to monitor and report on the population, tracking dissent and movements.

This colonial legacy has been inherited by post-independence governments, which have renamed and re-staffed the intelligence services but failed to change their fundamental orientation. The confusion between law enforcement intelligence (which focuses on solving crimes and identifying perpetrators) and strategic intelligence (which aims to predict future threats) is also addressed, emphasizing that the two are fundamentally different and should not be mixed up.

The article concludes by stating that the current focus on recording past events, rather than predicting future ones, is a fundamental failure of purpose for African intelligence services and a significant hindrance to effective national security.

Brief written by urgent.news from Daily Guide Network's own syndicated text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.